August 1, 2009 archive

Aug 01 2009

Random Japan

Easy come, easy go

Cops are searching for the owner of a bundle of ¥10,000 notes found at a garbage processing facility in Yamaguchi.

Three professors at the University of Tokyo were found to have scammed the government out of ¥7.5 million in grant money by falsifying expense claims “for laboratory instruments and other office materials.”

A housewife in Edogawa-ku who let a pair of thieves disguised as delivery men into her home was robbed of ¥10 million after being beaten up.

A Tokyo DJ was arrested for scamming a man out of ¥600,000, which the DJ claimed was the fee for canceling the man’s subscription to his website. “I couldn’t make a living just doing DJ work because it’s a job that doesn’t pay,” he told the police.

Welcome to the 21st century

A coalition of lawmakers has agreed to revise Japan’s pornography laws to ban the possession of child porn.

The Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry announced that, for the 19th time, it had received reports that an iPod Nano overheated and emitted sparks.

Responding to a spate of accidents caused by the whisper-quiet operation of hybrid cars, police in Fukushima have asked the owners of such vehicles to turn on their lights when driving during the day.

Tokyo’s Toyo University is offering a course in “Renewed Spectrology,” which attempts to study paranormal phenomena via “philosophical, psychological and religious approaches.”

Aug 01 2009

Funkalicious Friday





Aug 01 2009

Friday Night at 8: Virtual Wool Gathering

Photobucket

The sad thing about all the troubles we are going through fighting against the greedy and ignorant, is that it gives us a feeling of poverty in the midst of endless abundance.

I read the blogs trumpeting the big fights to give everyone the benefit of healing when they are sick.

We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to knowledge of how to heal — and I’m not speaking here of simply taking a pill and curing a particular illness, but of truly being healed.

It’s an experience that heals both the person who is sick and the person who heals them.

We have all the great achievements of humanity at our fingertips and so many folks around the world who have the answers to the big questions of how to alleviate needless suffering.

Right now we could all be rolling in clover.

Aug 01 2009

American Dumbass

With all that is so terribly wrong in this sordid and rapidly decomposing empire the amount of fixation on the White House ‘Beer Summit’ offers a crystal clear glimpse through the looking glass at WHY we are all fucked. The media fueled racial circus of the story of the rogue cop James Crowley and Professor Henry A. Gates led to yesterday’s sit down with The Pope of Hope and the V.P. from the Usury State over a few beers in a symbolic conference that was given the importance of say The Yalta Conference. In our cheapened, dumbed-down, busted-flat in Baton Rouge and fucked up the ass with no lube by the oligarchy lemming colony it’s media manufactured horseshit like this that gives me zero hope that anything will ever be fixed in my lifetime. With healthcare reform pretty much dead other than the certainty that the insurance corporations will be rolling in the dough from the coming mandated coverage, the wars still raging and the phony recovery setting up millions of suckers for the next fleecing it’s drivel like this that serves as news.

Oh and Michael Jackson is still dead.

Aug 01 2009

Mother’s love: a plea to Michelle Obama

An Agent Orange activist calls on the first lady to help dioxin victims in Vietnam.

Vietnamese victims of the defoliant Agent Orange play at a social sponsorship center in Da Nang City June 26, 2009. US warplanes dropped about 18 million gallons of the defoliant on southern Vietnam for most of the 1960s.

The following is a letter sent to Michelle Obama by Secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Association Len Aldis, who has worked for years to spread awareness of Agent Orange victims’ plight.

August 2 marks the beginning of Orange Week, a government program to create Agent Orange awareness through various programs nationwide. Orange Week ends on August 10, 48 years to the day since the US military begin spraying the defoliant on Vietnam.

Dear Michelle Obama,

You can find the Letter Here

Aug 01 2009

The falacy of a total consumer health plan system

Lately, I’m beginning to wonder if we’re ever truly going to have universal health insurance .  Now I’m well aware that even folks without coverage will get medical care, thankfully hospitals for the most part are obligated to treat people.  Yet, whether you have insurance or not, the whole sytem is a disaster.  One of the solutions, first coming from the libertarians followed by the conservatives and strangely enough some on the left, is the concept of a consumer-driven health insurance system. Basically, you treat your medical care as you (to borrow the examples I’ve heard) would buying car insurance or even (I dare say) buying a set of plates.  Here’s the problem, if you pick the wrong dinnette set you won’t die.  

Aug 01 2009

Friday Philosophy: Scanning the glbt news

In a life not dominated by the desire to change the world so that it would be a better place to live, moving would be a great excuse for taking a month away news and politics and trying to spread the word.

But my life is dominated by that mission.  

So I flipped a coin to see whether I should try to wrap some new words around an idea or two or post something old.  When one gets to be as old as I am, it gets more difficult to “write something new” since one may find that almost everything has already been addressed in the past couple of decades…or the 292 diaries posted here…or the 260 poems written.  As much as I would like for people to read my old diaries, in the spirit of learning about lives they cannot conceive, I know that the past gets forgotten very easily and reading someone’s old diaries is an unlikely occurrence.

Unfortunately for me, since it meant no nap this afternoon, on the last day before the moving begins, “something new” won.

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